DECEMBER 2020

Dear Reader,

News and notes from The December issue of The HistWriter Maybelle Wallis comes to you with seasonal greetings from Wexford in Ireland, where I, as an aspiring historical fiction writer, am working on the sequel to my debut novel Heart of Cruelty M Wallis | HistWriter.com

(link) Twitter: @DrMWallis

Here I share my writing journey and the way Facebook: @MWallisHistWriter that history helps me interpret the modern world, and my own profession: medicine. AUGUST 2020 | ISSUE NO. 4 THE HISTWRITER |DECEMBER 2020

‘Speranza’ - Jane Frances Elgee, later Lady Jane Wilde, was born in 1821 in Dublin. She published a number of translations of French and German poetry and gothic novels before working on her own poetry.

In the late 1840s, at a time of passionate resistance to British rule in the context of the , she started to write for ‘The Nation’, a seditious newspaper which was later proscribed by the British authorities. Her poems, published under a male pseudonym, described the oppression of Irish Catholics by the British government and the intense suffering of the famine victims:

Pale victims, where is your Fatherland? Where oppression is law from age to age, Where the death plague, and hunger, and misery rage, And tyrants a godless warfare wage Gainst the holiest rights of an ancient land

Where the corn waves green on the fair hillside, But each sheaf by the serfs and slavelings tied, Is taken to pamper a foreigner’s pride - There is our suffering Fatherland

Where broad rivers flow ‘neath a glorious sky And the valleys like gems of emerald lie; Yet the young men, and strong men, starve and die, For want of bread in their own rich land,

And we pile up their corpses, heap on heap, While the pale mothers faint, and the children weep; Yet the living might envy the dead their sleep So bitter is life in that mourning land AUGUST 2020 | ISSUE NO. 4 THE HISTWRITER |DECEMBER 2020

In ‘The Year of Revolutions’ she urged Irishmen to follow the example of the European revolutions of 1848:

Shall we, oh my brothers, but weep, pray, and groan, When France reads her rights by the flames of a throne? Shall we fear and falter to join the grand chorus When Europe has trod the dark pathway before us? Oh, courage! And we too will trample them down, The minions of power, the serfs of a crown.

When , the editor of ‘The Nation’, was prosecuted for sedition she turned up at his trial and claimed authorship of her poems. No legal action was taken against her and it did not lead to Duffy’s acquittal. In 1851 she married the surgeon and established herself as a literary salonniere, living a bohemian lifestyle from a grand house in Merrion Square, Dublin. One of their sons was , in whose personality and writing many saw his mother’s influence. Another son, Willie, became a journalist and a daughter, Isola, died in childhood. Sir William Wilde died in 1876, his career having ended in scandal. Jane continued to publish under the name ’Speranza’ (Hope) and moved to London, where she continued her salons in what was the then unfashionable neighbourhood of Tite Street in Chelsea. Oscar became a celebrated author, poet, editor and playwright. Tragedy was to overtake them. In 1896, while Oscar was imprisoned in Reading Gaol for homosexuality, Jane died of bronchitis at her home in London. It is said that her son saw her ‘fetch’ in his prison cell on the night of her death.

My short story: ‘The Man Who Killed the Thing He Loved’ (link) is about the hanged man who featured in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. AUGUST 2020 | ISSUE NO. 4 THE HISTWRITER |DECEMBER 2020

Negotiating with the Dead

Margaret Attwood, 2002.

‘The premise is that dead bodies can talk if you know how to listen to them, and they want to talk, and they want us to sit down beside them and listen to their sad stories.’ This volume of essays (link) by the famous author is often on my bedside table: a talisman against writer’s block and a fount of mildly sarcastic inspiration. Drawing illustrations from across a huge range of literature, Ms Atwood analyses what makes writers write. She explores the fear of death and the desire of the author for immortality. To achieve that holy grail, we writers must journey to the realm of the dead, where stories are to be found, seize the hidden treasure - ‘commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation’- and bring it to the land of the living without losing our souls along the way. In my novel ‘Heart of Cruelty’(link), Coroner Doughty has the gruesome task of hearing the tales that dead bodies have to tell. AUGUST 2020 | ISSUE NO. 4 THE HISTWRITER |DECEMBER 2020

Lucia's War

Susan Lanigan, Idee Fixe Press, 2020.

A meticulously researched and written historical novel following Lucia, a soprano who is a nurse on the Western Front in WW1 and later becomes an opera singer. The consequences of a wartime relationship haunt her through her life, creating a compelling tale with a moving ending.

Lucia is a black woman from Jamaica, and the author has worked hard to perfect her voice, achieving the ideal balance between authenticity and readability. There is a skilled exposition of the effects of racial prejudice and Lucia’s insights into it, which never becomes preachy. The writing is vivid and original, and the descriptions of character and place bring the book alive.

It’s popular nowadays to accuse white authors of ‘cultural appropriation’ if they write about black characters. I disagree. I think if, as writers, we choose to put characters from different races in our work we should just go ahead, especially if diversity was part of the social fabric at the time when the work is set. We should not create the impression that the Earth is only populated by certain races, and that only the stories of those races matter. The key thing is to inhabit our characters' skins, of whatever colour, with respect, and empathy. And I think Ms Lanigan has achieved this perfectly.

While not exactly a sequel, the narrative of ‘Lucia’s War’ (link) interconnects with Ms Lanigan’s previously published WW1 novel ‘White Feathers’ (link); I hope that a third book will appear in the future.

AUGUST 2020 | ISSUE NO. 4 THE HISTWRITER |DECEMBER 2020

Inventing the Victorians

Matthew Sweet, Faber & Faber, 2001

'Suppose everything we know about the Victorians is wrong.'

Forget the boredom of respectability, corseted sexual inhibitions and piano legs concealed by modest drapery.

In this lively and entertaining book (link), Matthew Sweet argues that much of our view of the Victorians is based on preconceptions and stereotypes which have been grafted onto their memory by later generations. He illustrates in detail how lively, liberal-minded and enterprising the Victorians could be.

Our notions of patriarchal Victorians can be thrown out: their era was when women found a voice in politics, entered male dominated professions, won property rights, were granted custody of their children after divorce, and moved away from traditional female roles.

We are appalled nowadays by the poverty and squalor of Victorian cities, but it was Victorian reformers and philanthropists who laid the foundations of the social infrastructure, maintained by local authorities, that modern neoliberals are hollowing out.

From drug dealers to serial killers, from stunt men to the innocence of childhood, Sweet connects Victorian culture with the present day.

AUGUST 2020 | ISSUE NO. 4 THE HISTWRITER | DECEMBER 2020 Next time:

M Wallis | HistWriter.com Forth Mountain Wexford Ireland